Part 6 (2/2)

Mrs. Toftrees p.r.i.c.ked up her ears, so to say. She was really the business head of the Toftrees combination. Her husband did the ornamental part and provided the red-hot plots, but it was she who had invented and carried out the ”note,” and it was she who supervised the contracts. As Mr. Amberley was well aware, what this keen, pretty and well-dressed little woman didn't know about publis.h.i.+ng was worth nothing whatever.

”Oh, really,” she said, in genuine surprise. ”Rather unusual for you, isn't it? Is the boy a genius then?”

Amberley shook his head. He hated everything the worthy Toftrees wrote--he had never been able to read more than ten lines of any of the half-dozen books he had published for them. But the Hanover Square side of him had a vast respect for the large sums the couple charmed from the pockets of the public no less than the handsome percentage they put into his own. And a confidential word on business matters with a pretty and pleasant little woman was not without allurement even under the Waggon-roof itself.

”Not at all. Not at all,” he murmured into a pretty ear. ”We are not paying the lad any advance upon royalties!” He laughed a well-fed laugh. ”Ince and Amberley's list,” he continued, ”is accepted for itself!”

Mrs. Toftrees smiled back at him. ”_Of course_,” she murmured. ”But I wasn't thinking of the financial side of it. Why? ... why are you departing from your usual traditions and throwing the shadow of your cloak over this fortunate boy?--if I may ask, of course!”

”Well,” Amberley answered, and her keen ear detected--or thought that she detected--a slight reluctance in his voice... . ”Well, Lothian brought him to me, you know.”

Mrs. Toftrees' face changed and Amberley saw it.

She was looking down the table to where Lothian was sitting. Her face was a little flushed, and the expression upon it--though not allowed to be explicit--was by no means agreeable. ”Lothian's work is very wonderful,” she said--and there was a question in her voice ”--you think so, Mr. Amberley?”

Bryanstone Square, the Dining Room, a.s.serted itself. Truth to tell, Amberley felt a little uncomfortable and displeased with himself. The fun of the dinner table--the cigarette moment--had rather escaped him.

He had got young people round him to-night. He wanted them to be jolly.

He had meant to be a good host, to forget his dignities, to unbend and be jolly with them--this fiction-mongering woman was becoming annoying.

”I certainly do, Mrs. Toftrees,” he replied, with dignity, and a distinct tone of reproof in his voice.

Mrs. Toftrees, the cool tradeswoman, gave the great man a soothing smile of complete understanding and agreement.

Mr. Amberley turned to a girl upon his left who had been taken in by d.i.c.kson Ingworth and who had been carrying on a laughing conversation with him during dinner.

She was a pretty girl, a friend of his daughter Muriel. He liked pretty girls, and he smiled half paternally, half gallantly at her.

”Won't you have another cigarette, Miss Wallace?” he said, pus.h.i.+ng a silver box towards her. ”They are supposed to be rather wonderful. My cousin Eustace Amberley is in the Egyptian Army and an aide-de-camp to the Khedive. The Khedive receives the officers every month and every one takes away a box of five hundred when they leave the palace--His Highness' own peculiar brand. These are some of them, which Eustace sent me.”

”May I?” she answered, a rounded, white arm stretched out to the box.

”They certainly are wonderful. I have to be content with Virginian at home. I buy fifty at a time, and a tin costs one and threepence.”

She lit it delicately from the little methyl lamp he pa.s.sed her, and the big man's kind eyes rested on her with appreciation.

She was, he thought, very like a Madonna of Donatello, which he had seen and liked in Florence. The abundant hair was a dark nut-brown, almost chocolate in certain lights. The eyes were brown also, the complexion the true Italian morbidezza, pale, but not pallid, like a furled magnolia bud. And the girl's mouth was charming--”delicious” was the word in the mind of this connoisseur. It was as clear-cut as that of a girl's face in a Grecian frieze of honey-coloured travertine, there was a serene sweetness about it. But when she smiled the whole face was changed. The young brown eyes lit up and visited others with their own, as a bee visits flowers. The smile was radiant and had a conscious provocation in it. The paleness of the cheeks showed such tints of pearl and rose that they seemed carved from the under surface of a sea-sh.e.l.l.

And, as Amberley looked, wis.h.i.+ng that he had talked more to her during dinner, startled suddenly to discover such loveliness, he saw her lips suddenly glow out into colour in an extraordinary way. It wasn't scarlet--unpainted lips are never really that--but of the veiled blood-colour that is warm and throbs with life; a colour that hardly any of the names we give to pigment can properly describe or fix.

What did he know about her? he asked himself as she was lighting her second cigarette. Hardly anything! She was a girl friend of his daughter's--they had been to the same school together at Bath--an orphan he thought, without any people. She earned her own living--a.s.sistant Librarian, he remembered, at old Podley's library.

Yes, Podley the millionaire nonconformist who was always endowing and inventing fads! And Muriel had told him that she wrote a little, short stories in some of the women's papers... .

”At any rate,” he said, while these thoughts were flas.h.i.+ng through his mind ”you smoke as if you liked it! All the girls smoke now, Muriel is inveterate, but I often have a suspicion that many of them do it because it's the fas.h.i.+on.”

Rita Wallace gave a wise little shake of her head.

”Oh, no,” she answered. ”Men know so little about girls! You think we're so different from you in lots of things, but we aren't really.

Muriel and I always used to smoke at school--it doesn't matter about telling now, does it?”

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